Reboot or Die: The New Life of DC Comics

It’s Tuesday afternoon in Times Square and fans are lining up outside Midtown Comics to see what the "New 52" looks like. The New 52 is a vast reimagining and redesign of DC’s 52 most iconic and beloved superheroes running through September. In short, it’s a bid to save comic books. Characters like Superman, Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, and Aquaman are getting new costumes and revamped origin stories: Superman is younger and has lost his red undies. Some characters now sport collars on their costumes. Aquaman is actually cool. And all 52 series are resetting their ticker back to issue #1.

The line is buzzing that Jim Lee and Geoff Johns will be showing up soon for the midnight launch and a signing. Lee and Johns are helming this risk—Johns is DC’s Chief Creative Officer and a big-time writer. Lee, DC’s co-publisher, is the primary illustrator behind the New 52 and something of a real world superhero.

At 5:15 p.m. there are 35 people on line. That number will balloon to 250 when organizers cut the line and call the police. Those 250 people include fans camping out in folding chairs, a middle-schooler furiously sketching superheroes ("He’s doing Darkseid!" one fan shouts), three possibly underage women in risqué superhero costumes, and a growing mass of 20- and 30-somethings clutching comics and talking shop.

For all intents and purposes, the midnight launch is a clusterfuck. Lee has flown in on a red-eye that morning (narrowly missing cancellations from Hurricane Irene). After weeks of interviews, he’s run back to his hotel to get cleaned up. Johns is generally under the weather and sleep-deprived. At 5:40 p.m., everyone’s running late getting to the store. More fans keep joining the line. Impatience grows.

Johns steps out of a town car about the same time that Lee walks up the street. At the store, DC press flacks are madly throwing up signage and ushering Lee and Johns to another round of industry interviews. The two re-appear just before 7 p.m. to join a press party held at Fashion 40, just two doors down from Midtown Comics. The growing line of fans watch as journalists and staff enjoy an open bar and flip through the new comics ahead of the public release.

The line keeps growing. Lee and Johns have disappeared.

Comic books are the modern erudite’s pornography. Men might keep a stash tucked away somewhere private or pretend to ignore the high shelf at the bookstore. We go to the movies with mock ambivalence and inner glee. Reading comics on the subway is still cause for sideways glances. Heck, even reading graphic novels, which purport to be for older, sophisticated types are a public rarity. Comic books are something we still do, for the most part, in private.

Yet the language of comic books is everywhere. This summer was driven yet again by super-powered blockbusters and tie-ins. Did you try the Captain America Coolatta at Dunkin Donuts? How about the Green Lantern-themed Subway sandwiches? Perhaps you were too busy watching Thor promote the Acura TL?

Superhero movies have reached a saturation point—never before has their reach extended so deep into culture, and our pockets. This, however, has put the comic book industry in a weird spot. Superheroes are bigger, more profitable, and more mainstream than ever before and yet individual comic book sales are faltering. Comic books sales dropped nearly 25% in January 2011 compared to the year before. There has been a steady decline in print sales year-over-year since 2009. With superheroes more popular than ever but print sales decreasing, are comic book movies ruining comic books?

Historically, superhero films do well when they’re easy to understand. Take, for example, the recent Captain America movie from Marvel. A skinny kid with a big heart gets some super-serum that turns him into a super-soldier who super-kicks Nazi ass. He then goes, er, spoiler alert, "inactive" and wakes up 70 years later fresh as a daisy.

In the comic books, there are actually several other iterations of Captain America, ordinary people who wear the costume and either die or retire. The actual Captain also dies in one strand of the Marvel Universe, except he isn’t dead depending on which series you read or if you believe in time travel. Or miracles.

None of this is in the movie. Neither will it probably be in the forthcoming Avengers movie, which features a team of Marvel’s marquee superheroes for the blockbuster of all summer blockbusters. It’ll probably be left out because it’s way too complicated. Modern comic books, despite their glossy pages and light dialogue, are actually really hard to keep straight.

The DC Comics universe has something like 59 different versions of Earth (Earth-1, Earth Prime, Earth-172) on which parallel versions of characters live out their lives based on different print runs and series. In April of 1985, DC attempted to consolidate its universe with a massive 12-part series called "Crisis on Infinite Earths" which helped narrow the field but still left the continuity a better-organized mess. The Batman movies are fun until you start to wonder if this is Batman from Earth-2 or Earth-7.

All that mumbo-jumbo is driving away the casual fan that just wants to see their favorite superhero punch a bad guy and save the day without getting bogged down in continuity errors. Not every current comic book is an intellectual maze but it’s still a trick to figure out why Robin is a girl in one series, a boy in another, and non-existent in a third. Or better yet, why Spider-Man is a Caucasian Peter Parker in one run and a half-black, half-Hispanic Miles Morales in another.

DC’s massive overhaul is meant to erase most of those obstacles and level the playing field. Fans that pick up any of the New 52 stories won’t have to bother about which "Earth" this Superman is fighting on. In some ways, it’s making the comic books more like the films: Character and continuity is simplified so that any fan—hardcore or casual—can just start reading. "People are so busy that they only have time for the big things," says Johns, who has been a writer on several relaunches. "What I like about this is that it just gets back to comics. I think people are ready for a change and people are just ready to get back to enjoying comics again."

The New 52 is a grand move to reverse the flow, draw in casual, first-time readers and turn around comic book sales for a whole new demographic. "We’re not redefining who Batman is by redefining his origin in a dramatic way," Lee says, "What we’re doing is taking the thing that made Batman successful and building off that." Needless to say, it’s still going to piss off a lot of fans.

It’s just after 7 p.m. in Times Square and Lee and Johns have disappeared. A DC agent is trying to get them to do yet another interview but the two have snuck out of the party.

Camera flashes go off outside in the dimming light and the crowd gives muted hollers. Lee and Johns are outside handing out bos of pizzas to hungry fans. Lee, wearing a black button-down, jeans, and dress shoes poses for photos fans before grabbing another pizza box from Johns, dressed in jeans and a light grey Van Halen tee, with his black Batman hat pulled low over his eyes.

Amidst the Times Square scrum, groups of strangers fight over which version of Green Lantern is best while another leafs through a sheaf of comic books to find backup evidence. A group of nine reminisces about the first time they saw Star Trek. Wearing Converse and flat-brimmed hats, the circle is like a nerd version of street-side summer jam sessions. Rather than searching for the right chords, the group pokes and prods to see who knows the most about Batman’s hardest fight or Superman’s brief life on Krypton.

Lee and Johns manage to grab a beer at Fashion 40 before midnight and share a brief moment shooting the shit with their DC friends. Inside the comic shop, the new issues are laid out like religious artifacts. An entire wall of the store has been arrayed with DC comics. At the front is a regal-looking table dressed in red cloth flanked by DC signage and piled with Sharpies for Lee and Johns. Midtown hopes to burn through the line no later than 1 a.m., DC press thinks it’ll be closer to 2 a.m., and Lee plans to stay as long as it takes.

When midnight comes, it’s both a moment of release and tension. The New 52 has officially launched but Lee and Johns are just starting their shift. The first fans, waiting for nearly seven hours, enter the store and the gathered DC staff gives them a standing ovation. The costumed girls are ushered in early and take pictures holding product for the DC photographer. Lee and Johns are both somehow still awake and in good humor. The hot ticket is a new Justice League of America comic. DC later says they had to rush a second printing of the comic since they pre-sold more than 200,000 copies, their entire first print run. Several other DC titles sold in the 100,000 range with similar sales predicted through September as new titles are gradually released.

There is, however, a fair mix of excitement and backlash to the New 52 from both casual and hardcore fans. Some people don’t want a younger Superman or prefer a grittier version of Batman. There are rumblings that the New 52 will "dumb down" the comics or rumors that the costume redesigns are just meant to help make upcoming DC films look and feel more uniform. "We can’t be pollsters and we can’t just do what fans want and expect. They also want to be surprised," says Lee. "They might not love it immediately but if we do our jobs properly, then they’ll grow to love it."

Marvel has already figured out Hollywood. In 1998, Marvel created Marvel Entertainment, an internal division to help develop movies. Since then, it has been controlling the way its most cherished stars hit the silver screen. Those movies have helped Marvel pull in a ton of cash and overtake DC in terms of comic book market share. For July 2011, Marvel had a commanding 39% market share compared to DC’s 30%. Marvel’s superhero movies have helped butter-up a mainstream audience and drive them towards the books. Take Captain America, whose comic books were everywhere before the launch of the movie. These tie-ins almost always result in a boost for book sales.

Marvel has had an eye on the theatrical endgame. The seeds for the upcoming Avengers movies were set back when Marvel approved films based on the major characters (Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the Hulk). "The smartest move that we at Marvel did was not try to reinvent the wheel," says Joe Quesada, Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer. "All you have to do is follow the path, you know, follow the road map from since when these characters were created... that’s one of the great things about working at Marvel, we have such cool toys to play with."

DC, by comparison, has been slow out of the gates. Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies have been a massive success, but Superman has been absent since 2006 and the critics panned Green Lantern, even if it showed (an internationally-boosted) profit.

Marvel and DC are often portrayed as bickering siblings fighting to get to the number one spot. There are a number of other smaller comic houses but they pale in comparison to the two giants. (The next largest company in July was IDW Publishing with 5% market share.) In reality, Marvel and DC are more like frenemies. Freelance illustrators and writers have frequently jumped sides and even Jim Lee, now with DC, had a famous stint drawing Marvel’s X-Men. Marvel and DC have sometimes paired up for wildly successful crossovers but the series are often short-lived as creative difficulties and tensions inevitably flare up.

It doesn’t help that both houses have a lot of super-heroic overlap in style and character. Each has a character with super speed (The Flash, DC; Quicksilver, Marvel) and power over the sea (Aquaman, DC; Namor, Marvel), not to mention their respective gruff lone wolves (Batman; Wolverine) or the iconic All-American (Superman, DC, Captain America, Marvel). These characters all make up two important superhero groups. DC’s team is the Justice League of America and Marvel’s is the Avengers. In many ways these mega-groups set the tone for the entire universe and help bring in mainstream fans. The Justice League and Avengers are like prep-courses for the uninitiated or fickle. Don’t like Green Lantern? There are half-a-dozen other heroes on the next page.

That’s why Lee and Johns’ Justice League has such high stakes, especially as Marvel ploughs forward with their inevitably successful Avengers blockbuster. In many ways DC and Marvel are constantly fighting to outbuzz each other. Accordingly, there is a lot of pressure on JLA #1 to do well and Lee and John’s know it. "When we sat down about the re-number and the new costumes, all of that was to gain as much attention and to bring old and new fans into the business," Johns says. "If you’re going to streamline the continuity and really take that calculated risk, you want to have as wide a net as possible." There are rumors that DC is prepping its own supergroup movie, though all lips are sealed.

The movies aren’t all good though. For movie lovers, the prospect of CGI heroes fighting evil every summer into eternity is a troubling future. Superhero movies are often an odd balance of spectacle and merchandising. For every Captain America, Iron Man or Nolan Batman, there’s a Green Lantern waiting in the wings. "I think the people that make [superhero movies] are sincere in trying to capture a comic book aesthetic, a comic book style," says David Denby, film critic for the New Yorker. His review for Green Lantern criticized its reliance on digital wizardry and the "3D" tag to sell tickets and merchandise.

Still, the movies do well for a reason. "I don’t think any other [movie] genre can really blow your mind as much as comics," Lee says. "Comics are only limited by one’s imagination and the technology has risen to the point where they can translate a lot of that vision into film." Quesada sees it as a natural progression. The kids that grew up reading iconic comic books like Watchmen or Sin City aren’t just in the audience; they’re now old enough to be making those films.

Denby worries that a certain, hollow brand of superhero movie will become the Howard Johnson of the movie biz: A constant stream of films that are reliably profitable and reliably stale. At the same time, Denby admits the power of those films. "There is a kind of exhilaration of leaving reality behind, a playfulness that links very closely to kids’ fantasies," he says. "It’s a pretty tame fantasy but I remember when I was three, I would put myself to sleep by pretending to fly around and bonk villains on the head and save damsels in distress. If that isn’t a comic book fantasy then I don’t know what is."

A "good" comic movie is possible, the problem is that comic book movies don’t need to be good to serve their purpose: Make money, sell comic books, sell merchandise, and create a new audience. "The studios are creating the audience they want to sell to," Denby says. "I think that’s my nightmare."

It’s an economy that creates more questions than answers. Will print permanently take a backseat to cash cow films? Or can they synergize ultimately increasing print readership? And what’s at stake for the swarm of comic houses playing in the shadows of Marvel and DC? A lot of those questions might get answered after the recession, says Quesada. "We are dealing with today one of the greatest, economically tough times in the history of our nation. So to point to comic books and say individual comic book sales aren’t what they used to be even two years go is like, ’Yeah.’"

Some are hedging their bets with digital innovation. Along with the New 52, DC is launching Same Day Digital, allowing fans to buy comic books for their iPad, tablet or laptop the same day that comics hit stores with discounts after a month. Fans will have instant access to their heroes even if they can’t get to a store. However, there’s always the possibility that the simplicity of digital downloads may cannibalize print sales. Purists will harrumph that nothing beats having a book in hand but ultimately, readership is key.

Comic books aren’t going away, but it’s unclear how they’ll emerge. There is still some magic. Even if we don’t want to take our JLA #1 on the subway, there’s a thrill in seeing Batman stare down Superman. Comic books are best when they play to our nostalgic need to look up to someone. The recession, the debt crisis, or villains made of Kryptonite are all looming threats in the comic book world. It’s just as easy to see the fight for moral right as a proxy for present day dangers as it to forget it all and just keep cheering for the good guys to win.

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